You fell for the boondoggle. Waymo has a very narrow set of routes you can take. They collect ultra HD maps for those routes in SF which has a completely unsustainable human labor cost. It doesn’t scale to “drive me on any road”. Waymo is localized-only driving funded at a major loss by a search ads monopoly.
Cruise does the same, just with VC money (and weird low-traffic hours of operation).
They have not solved driving in the generic sense and they are fooling you (and investors)
Three specific demographics prefer the (from the factory) higher ride height of SUVs:
1) Women
2) The elderly
3) The overweight
Women have a say in over 70% of vehicle purchases in the US. So even if the vehicle is for dad, mom (who is 5’4” on average) preferring the higher ride height of the SUV will influence the purchase if she has to drive it occasionally.
The elderly and the fat have a harder time getting in and out of lower-riding cars/hatches. The country is getting both older and fatter at the same time.
These are the driving forces in crossover dominance.
This whole thread is just hilarious. All sorts of assumptions, rationalizations, and derogatory assessments of why other people don't make exactly the same car buying choice. And of course a very heavy dose of virtue signaling.
Their app is a thin wrapper to their mobile site. With Safari push notifications, they don’t need the App Store. I would guess the App Store isn’t a path of discoverability for them anyways. People find them very intentionally on the web.
There's no lock in here. People are free to switch to one of the many competing services. It's not a monopoly under any reasonable definition of the term. Of course switching is going to have inertia, but that's not lock in. Lock in is when you are contractually obligated not to change, or if the monopoly is shutting down all competing services (perhaps by acquisition) so that there are no alternatives. For a good example of this type of lock in, just look at Ticketmaster.
1 - That isn’t lock in. That’s like saying you’re locked in to your month to month rental apartment because you have to move so much furniture, and that has a hassle and cost associated with it.
No, you seem to be confusing "vendor lock-in" with "monopoly". The above isn't what is meant by "vendor lock-in". Here's a good explanation by Cloudflare:
> Vendor lock-in refers to a situation where the cost of switching to a different vendor is so high that the customer is essentially stuck with the original vendor. Because of financial pressures, an insufficient workforce, or the need to avoid interruptions to business operations, the customer is "locked in" to what may be an inferior product or service.
A practical example of vendor lock-in is an elderly aunt with mine who has an email address from her ISP. She isn't "contractually obligated" to continue using that email, nor the ISP. The ISP certainly doesn't have a monopoly on email. But the effort to switch from an email that she's been using for 15 years is very high for someone with weak tech skills. I'm probably in a similar situation with Gmail, as it's the primary contact by which most people know me. I can't take my Gmail address and port it; I have to create a new email and get people to update their address books.
Well, whatever you want to call it, it's not monopoly, it's not illegal, and it's not even necessarily intended; it's just the nature of things that switching incurs costs. By this definition I too am "locked in" to my apartment, because even though my signed lease only runs through next year, if I want to leave I have to incur all the costs and hassles of moving.
But I don't really feel "locked in" to the apartment. Maybe it needs a better, more accurate phrase. "Switching friction"? That more accurately describes the situation than "lock in".
Here's one for Google Workspace Admin: "The Annual Plan charges you for the exact number of licenses you signed up for through a yearly commitment." The "commitment" makes it sound non-refundable. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en
If you contract for services for a year, and pay for that year up front at a discounted rate, why would you expect a refund if you unilaterally terminate the contract partway through? Just wait until the contract is up to switch services. You already paid for those months! If you're not sure you want to use the service for a full year then opt for the month-to-month contract.
>There has never been a vaccine with a side effect found after more than 2-3 months. Long term side-effects are not a thing for vaccines.
Bullshit and demonstrably false. The first gen rotavirus vaccine was pulled post-marketing because it destroyed the intestines of infants. Was on the market for a year.
But the adverse effects showed within a week [1] which confirms my point. Yes, it took long to act upon those adverse effect reports, but the effect itself occured quickly.
Well good thing there's not a huge surge of reports coming into VAERS or other reporting databases then, or we might have evidence a similar thing is occurring.
lol, no. You know that not a single vaccinated vs unvaccinated population study has ever been conducted, right?
VAERS is designed to detect acute, recent reactions and only acute, recent reactions. If it's not an accute, recent reaction, it probably never makes it into VAERS. That notion that long-term effects could even be reasonably detected today without a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population study is highly questionable. The CDC refuses to do a vaccinated vs unvaccinated comparison study of overall mortality and disease prevalence. Don't believe me? Go on YouTube and you can find videos of Melinda Wharton making excuses to not do it. Sad, laughable excuses.
Also, you mentioned a German specialist: are you only considering vaccine rollouts in high HDI nations? Because DTP is absolutely associated with increase overall mortality in developing nations. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15082643/
Worth noting that DTP was the reason why the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act was lobbied for and passed in the first place. Vaccines were so "safe", that they couldn't be brought to market for a profit because injuries and lawsuits were so frequent. So, the government indemnified the manufacturers, capped the max injury settlement at $250k, made a special court for vaccine injury where all documents are under seal, and had HHS (taxpayers) make all the payouts. Sounds safe to me!
And no approval. In other words, this is a dangerous class of drug that has failed to obtain a single human-use approval in 30 years. Thanks for the info!
EDIT: Your downvotes are delicious as you provide no source. The notion of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural immunity, especially with mRNA vaccines, is absurd. You are generating response to a single surface protein of the virus. The virus has many surface proteins and a natural infection will tune the immune system to respond to all of them. There is no evidence of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural.
Useless paper. Measuring arbitrary antibody levels. The antibody levels produced by natural exposure could be sufficient to protect against hospitalization, and the additional vaccine dose could be unnecessary. Also, 21-day follow up (laughable).
Show me some real-world data of previously infected individuals getting severe reinfections at significantly higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That's the metric needed to make your claim and those data have not been produced. Also, the staying power of the vaccine is already in question BY ITS OWN MANUFACTURER just via the prospect of boosters. They admit implicitly that the immunity their drug produces does not last.
Because before 2020, natural immunity to virtually any infectious disease was considered sufficient and superior to immunization. The entire concept of natural immunity being "not good enough' is brand new. It was never uttered before COVID, and it has never been proven even during COVID. It's an absurdity, that nobody in the realm of infectious disease even entertained before government started acting forcefully on behalf of pharmaceutical companies in the past 18 months.
Go look for yourself. "Do I need varicella vaccine if I had chickenpox?" The answer is NO.
>Oh, this is a different disease
Okay, then produce a single study indicating that those with prior COVID infection are hospitalized with a reinfection at higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That study doesn't exist. It's all just arbitrary anti-body level response studies, which are useless. If you can't produce a study to show why this infectious disease should be treated differently than all the others, then we'll go with the default position: natural immunity is enough.
"Don't take the unproven, unjustified drug" is the default position in medicine. You are trying to shift the burden of proof here and it's embarrassing.
YOU are making at least 3 positive claims when advocating vaccination for those with prior COVID infections:
1) COVID natural immunity breaks historical patterns of natural immunity in similar infectious disease
2) People with "only" natural immunity are at significant risk of severe reinfection
3) There is a risk-adjusted, significant benefit for those with "only" natural immunity to get vaccinated
>Algorithms are just laundering bad opinions like blood splatter analysis
You have way too much faith in the legal system. So many pseudo-scientific classes of evidence exist:
- Field sobriety tests
- Ballistic forensics
- Blood spatter analysis, as you mentioned
- Bite pattern analysis
- Burn / arson forensics
- Polygraph
- Biometrics under less-than-perfect conditions (your fingerprint reader on your phone works well because it's near perfect conditions. Crime scene partial finger prints are usually insufficient. Same for facial recognition -- works with your iPhone FaceID sensor, doesn't work with the gas station 480x320 camera)
- Most DNA and hair analysis
Pretty much all hocus pocus. Courts don't care. Anything for the conviction. Anyone hoping for fair scientific analysis in a court of law today is in for a rude awakening.
To be fair, polygraph tests aren't admissible as evidence in court, but I completely agree with your larger point. You also left out drug sniffing dogs, which are just a prop for the justification of an otherwise illegal search, and apparently drug sniffing cops too. There was recently a case where a cop claimed in court to have smelled unburned pot from several cars away while driving on the interstate. This was fortunately thrown out but it's not guaranteed.
I don’t find it misguided at all. I’m far more productive with JVM languages than JS. It has always bothered me that JS won in the browser environment.
Java applets were clunky and dangerous, but I still wish I didn’t have to delve into JS hell just to make a website.
1) The car fails to accelerate to beat the truck as it merges (the safest option given the scenario, even with the yield sign)
2) The car almost collides with the trailer of the truck and it stops with its nose sticking out into the merge lane
3) The car sits there with its nose in the merge lane as other cars go by
4) When the car finally has an opportunity to merge after having done everything wrong up to this point, it sheepishly merges and takes forever to get up to speed. This is basically the least safe thing it can do when yield-merging into a high speed lane.
LOL. This is the best the autonomous driving world has to offer? 80% of this driving is an immediate failure for a teenage driver taking their road course. I think I can take pretty much any random 2 minute sample from that video and find more than a few inputs/maneuvers that would lead to failure in a driver's license test. Why would ANYONE with a brain put their life into the hands of this system?
OH, and do you want to know a little industry secret about these "unedited" long videos? Yes, the video is uncut. But guess what? They drove that route hundreds of times and only showed the best run. And they got laser-HD maps of the route that they won't have globally. This is what Zoox did for their infamous demo that got them bought out by Amazon. And it's what Tesla did for their "Full Self-Driving" video on YouTube that shows driving ability that their cars cannot match even today. Shhh, you didn't hear it from me.
Sorry at (1) yield means yield. Maybe it shouldn't have stuck the nose so far out, but yeah you have to wait until proper gap in the traffic. The non-accelerating to highway speed is the real bug though.
There WAS a proper gap in traffic if the car used its accelerator on the ramp. The car would not have impeded the truck at all if it drove the ramp faster. This is an incredibly common issue with autonomous systems: anticipation of other vehicles with an awkward angle of attack, which is common while merging or while other cars are merging. Also, autonomous systems also tend to be way too cautious, which is incredibly dangerous in merging scenarios.
A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed. Yield does not mean stop. A cautious driver slows before the merge point, maintains a roll, then mashes the accelerator to merge safely at next opportunity. A terrible driver (Mobileye) stop abruptly at the end of the merge junction, almost hits a truck, leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic, then dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough. You can even see how much this freaks out the human passenger. He thought he was going to get hit!
> A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed
No. A good driver stops at the yield sign if an approaching vehicle is 2-3 car lengths away. It is dangerous to play guessing games with your car's engine and another driver's attention. If anything goes wrong (tire puncture, engine dies, slippery road, truck driver slams the gas) you have successfully managed to put yourself into the direct path of a speeding brick wall 5x as heavy as you. There is never a safe merging scenario where the right choice is to slam the gas pedal to beat another driver to the punch, especially not when merging onto an active freeway.
If there is a yield sign at the end of the onramp, that means prepare to yield. If there is not a yield sign, then the expectation is to keep merging. There wouldn't be a point to the yield sign if everyone treated it as if it didn't exist.
> leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic,
I also agree with you but this may be a byproduct of the camera's perspective and maybe it would look normal in the driver's seat. We don't really have a great view but the truck could also have been hugging the curb which would have brought it closer to the car than it should be.
> dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough
Fully agree here. If you merge you have to commit to matching the speed of nearby vehicles or else you're creating a dangerous situation. Mobileye should have sped up much faster than it did.
I think you should watch the scenario again. The car is only beat to the junction by the truck towing the trailer because the Mobileye car takes the wide-radius ramp at sub 22 km/h (13 mph). Normal human driver takes that ramp at 40-50 km/h, follows the hatchback out of the junction at flow of traffic speed, with 2-3 seconds of distance behind them for the truck to have a safe braking distance. The truck would have no need to modify speed, and the Mobileye car would satisfy the yield sign (not forcing another car to hit the brakes).
I think people lower their expectations for autonomous systems. Driving the ramp at a speed a human would and taking that obvious gap to zipper-merge is the correct maneuver for a human. Perhaps you want the autonomous system to err on the side of caution, but I'm actually trying to hold it to a human standard.
But yeah, at the very least, don't get confused and sit there with your nose out in traffic. What's really scary is that this is the take Mobileye chose to go with. They probably had dozens more, with even worse blunders.
Cruise does the same, just with VC money (and weird low-traffic hours of operation).
They have not solved driving in the generic sense and they are fooling you (and investors)